Anais Nin

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.

The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.

It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.

If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.

I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?

I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.